Non invasive measurement of the concentrations of different absorbing substances in optically turbid media, such as living tissue, is challenging. A commonly used method for this employs the measurement of the reflected light from such an optically turbid medium. An essential part of the light reflected from a turbid medium has travelled through the medium and was directed out of the medium by scattering. The main problem of such measurements is that the optical path length of the detected photons is strongly dependent on the optical properties, such as the absorption coefficient, the scattering coefficient and the angular distribution of scattering, also referred to as scattering phase function. As a result, the path length of detected photons is dependent on the measurement geometry and optical properties, and varies with wavelength. Absolute measurements of concentrations based on absorption spectroscopy in turbid media may be compromised by the dependence of the path length on the properties of a medium under consideration.
Classical reflectance spectroscopy devices known from the prior art often utilized multiple optical fibers to deliver and collect light during measurement. However, the potential advantages of reflectance probes with a single optical fiber to deliver/collect light are numerous. Advantages of the single fiber design include small probe size and simple device design, making it more-suitable than multi-fiber probes for clinical applications, such as optical biopsy of potential malignancies via endoscopy or biopsy needles. However, there exists no empirical or analytical description of light transport in the regime associated with overlapping source-detector areas, such as when using a single fiber.
An embodiment of a reflectance spectroscopy system using overlapping illumination-detection areas for determining the absorption coefficient in a turbid medium is known from Kanick et al. Phys. Biol. 54, 6991-7008 (2009). In the known embodiment a method is disclosed wherein a single fiber is used and positioned at a surface of the tissue under investigation. The fiber is used for illuminating the tissue as well as for collecting the reflected light.
It is a disadvantage of the known method that the dependence of the effective path length of photons on scattering phase function as well as the reduced scattering coefficients were guessed, which might lead to inaccurate determination of the absorption coefficient.